New Features in Live Maps Portal: Service Notes

 5 April April 2016  blogs  Rachel Harviksen  3 min read

A Service Note is essentially a text field associated with a service and can be used in many ways. For example, it could be used to describe the service’s current health state, the people or processes currently investigating the health state.

To get you started with Service Notes, you will have to click on the edit icon located in the header of the Service Map page. This will allow you to create, view or edit a Service Note.

The edit icon brings up an empty text editor when no note is associated with the service.

As you can see in the image above, a Service Note can be used to briefly explain the current state of a service.

A Service Note could also indicate that someone is already investigating service disruptions.

A Service Note can even be used to document the steps that have been taken to address issues.

The notes will be accessible from the Service Overview page as hover text. If there is a note associated with a service, then you will see the note icon next to the service, so simply hover over it to see the content of the Service Note.

Users can quickly view Service Notes by hovering over the cell containing the service’s name. This is a handy way to mark the services that are already being worked on, and can provide users with a greater depth of information directly on the Service Overview page.

They are updated at the same frequency as health updates and alerts. This value defaults to sixty seconds, but can be set to any value between fifteen seconds and three hours on the settings page. If a Service Note is changed, other pages will not reflect the change until their next update.

If a note is updated by someone else while you are editing, you will be informed and the message will be shown in the editing window. You can cancel to retain the other person’s note or save to override their changes.

The Service Note window will inform you if the service note is updated while you are editing.

As you can see, Service Notes are a great way to communicate updates about services to other users within the organization. They are accessible from the Live Maps Services Overview and Service Map dashboards, and can communicate that a service outage is already being worked on, what the estimated amount of downtime will be or who to call or contact if there is an outage.